The VisionTek CryoVenom R9 290 ($600 direct) graphics card answers the age-old question: What do you get when you take one of the most powerful GPUs on the market and pair it with an enthusiast-class water-cooling solution? The answer: One of the fastest AMD GPUs we've ever testedand the quietest. But while its water-cooling solution is innovative, setup is more complicated, and the price of the card is twice that of the R9 290, our current Editors' Choice.

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AMD's reference R9 290 and R9 290X GPUs are great cards on the performance front, but the reference cooler design leaves much to be desired. Put simply, these cards are loud. Very loud. Significantly louder than Nvidia's own high-end GeForce GTX 780 and GTX 780 Ti. When the R9 290 and 290X launched, one of the significant caveats against early adoption was that third-party vendors would be bringing their own, superior cooling solutions online.

The CryoVenom R9 290 is one such cardexcept, instead of using a better air cooler, VisionTek opted for water. The company is building two versions of the GPUone version, which we tested, will ship with just the water-cooling block installed, while another version, coming soon, will include the GPU, waterblock, radiator, pump, and tubing.

VisionTek sent along cooling hardware manufactured by its partner, EKWB, a Europe-based water-cooling kit provider. This is the first time we've worked with its products, but we're genuinely impressed with the included kit. The fittings are all well-manufactured, and the included instruction manuals are excellent. VisionTek is including a 15-percent-off coupon for the EKWB store with every CryoVenom shipped, to help defray the costs of the cooling solution. End-users, however, are not locked into EKWBif you already have a water-cooling loop or want to source your hardware elsewhere, VT has taken pains to ensure that the CryoVenom's water block is compatible with other solutions.

Setup
Configuring a water-cooled GPU isn't difficult, but it's definitely more time-consuming than a standard GPU, particularly if you've never used one before. It's important to make certain that your case can mount whatever radiator you choose to use, you'll be cutting tubing to run between the GPU, the radiator, and the pump, and you'll have to attach the compression fittings by hand. These are barbed fittings that slip into the water hoses and are then hand-tightened to a snug fit, clamping the end of the hose firmly around the metal barb and ensuring a strong seal. Mounting a water cooler also requires space enough for the pump and reservoir housingin our case, we mounted the system into the unused 5.25-inch drive bays in a Corsair Obsidian Series 900D chassis.

Once the fittings are attached and the GPU installed, it's time for a leak test. The simplest way to perform a leak test is to connect the pump to your computer's power supply, disconnect the standard ATX power connectors from the motherboard, and short the green wire in the ATX PSU 24-pin connector to any of the black (ground) wires. This will power up the PSU and water pump without turning on the rest of the system. EKWB recommends a 24-hour leak test before actually turning the system on.

Obviously this is quite a bit of additional work, but the payoff is significant. At full-load in gaming and cryptocurrency mining, the CryoVenom hit load temperatures of 46 degrees Celsius. And the acoustic payoff for all that cooling is a quiet humming from the water pump and the occasional slight gurgle of water from the system. The blower fans on the radiator run quietly and don't spin up to any significant degree.

Performance
We paired the CryoVenom R9 290 with an Intel DZ77GA-70K motherboard with an Intel Core i7-3770K CPU and 8GB of DDR3-1600. Windows 7 64-bit w/ SP1 and all available patches were used.

Because the GPU is water-cooled, VisionTek can sell it clocked significantly above stock. VisionTek ships each card with a certificate that gives its certified core clock and RAM clock speeds. Our sample was clocked at 1,125MHz core and 1,450MHz memory. That's an increase of 18 percent and 16 percent over AMD's 290 reference design.

VisionTek certifies these clock speeds without increasing the GPU's voltage, since that might harm the card's lifespan even at lower temperatures. We tested the CryoVenom Ro 290's headroom with a voltage tap, and we were able to increase the GPU core clock all the way up to 1,225MHza further gain of nine percent over the shipping clock, and 30 percent over stock frequency.

All of our tests were conducted at the certified frequencies of 1,125MHz core/1,450MHz memory, and the performance figures speak for themselves. The CryoVenom R9 290 was fast. The size of the gap varies depending on how CPU-intensive the benchmark test is, but the CryoVenom was a full 20 percent faster than a stock R9 290 in Metro 2033, 15 percent faster in Hitman: Absolution, and 16 percent faster in Shogun 2. The gap between the CryoVenom and the full-powered AMD R9 290X is smaller, but the CryoVenom R9 290 still beats the conventional R9 290X in every single tes.t Ordinarily, the R9 290X is about 5 percent faster than the R9 290. The point is that this card is markedly faster than the R9 290X, despite being based on the R9 290.

Ultimately, the only card trading punches with the Cryovenom R9 290 is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti. Across our test suites, the CryoVenom R9 290 beat the Nvidia GTX 780 Ti in Metro 2033 and Hitman: Absolution, but fell behind in BioShock Infinite, Civilization V, and Shogun 2. Still, that's quite an achievement for a GPU with a direct price of $550 when facing off against Nvidia's top-end graphics card and its $699 list price.

Real-World Benefits
The CryoVenom R9 290's performance makes it the fastest AMD GPU we've ever tested, but the real benefits of water cooling is the low noise and low operating temperatures. Enthusiasts have been buying their own water cooling blocks and constructing cooling loops for years, but what VisionTek is doing here is something different. The company has bridged the gap between the hard-core enthusiast and the more conventional customer, and is willing to pre-test the GPU at a high clock speed, warranty that clock speed, and sell the finished product with the waterblock already mounted.

The CryoVenom R9 290 is unapologetically an enthusiast product. This is a GPU designed for people who want to have their cake and eat it too, and its increased performance is only one of its advantages. Once you factor in the cost of a water-cooling kit, it's still going to be more expensive than an AMD R9 290X or an Nvidia GTX 780 Ti, but it maintains operating temperatures and volume levels no air-cooled card can touch.

Similarly, though we didn't have the chance to test the CryoVenom R9 290 in a multi-GPU configuration, we have tested air-cooled versions of the AMD R9 290 in Crossfire. The resulting noise is ridiculously loud. Two CryoVenom's, on the other hand, wouldn't be loud at all, and water coolers are designed to pump liquid through multiple parts of the case before routing it through the radiator and back to the reservoir. Configuring two CryoVenom's in Crossfire wouldn't be difficult, and the extra hoses and clamp fittings are relatively cheap.

Cost
Product cost is a bit harder to pin down. EKWB sells a small kit for $240 and includes a CPU cooler for those who want to overclock their CPU and GPU in the same loop. This is a decent starting point for evaluating the price of the CryoVenom R9 290, since EKWB is VisionTek's primary partner. After the 15-percent-discount coupon, the total price for card and kit comes to $753. That's still more expensive than Nvidia's air-cooled GTX 780 Ti, but again, the noise and temperature advantages of water cooling beat the strengths of any air-cooled card.

The CryoVenom R9 290 isn't a card that's going to appeal to everyone. If you're not comfortable building your own water loop, or you don't have a larger ATX case capable of holding the radiators, then this isn't up your alley. But as someone who has never built a water-loop before (I've dealt with phase-change Freon cooling, but not self-assembled liquid cooling), I can honestly say that the setup and configuration isn't as difficult as I thought it would be, while the performance improvements are dramatic.

The Visiontek CryoVenom R9 290 is unique in the best sense of the word. It's the quietest, coolest , and fastest AMD GPU we've ever tested. But those traits are delivered by a cooling solution that literally doesn't compare to any conventional air-cooled card. That makes it difficult to recommend as a general solution for the average buyer. The AMD Radeon R9 290 retains the Editors' Choice, as it represents the best overall value for the price (it's about $250 cheaper than the CryoVenom R9 290), and the fact that it doesn't require the complicated, though innovative, cooling system that the CryoVenom card does. That said, if you've got the money to spend and you want a solution that delivers a near-perfect trifecta of performance, temperatures, and cooling, the CryoVenom is worth serious consideration.

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